Post by El Santo on Apr 5, 2023 12:27:51 GMT -5
Watching Kingdom of the Spiders last night for the first time since I was a teenager has gotten me thinking about the various different strains of animal attack films that operated in tandem throughout the 1970's. I think I've identified four major ones:
1. Animal Disasters
This is probably the ancestral lineage, with 1954's The Naked Jungle serving as the type specimen. In these movies, the attacking animals are treated more or less as a natural disaster on par with an earthquake, a tidal wave, or a forest fire. Although there's certainly the potential for individual human deaths, perhaps even on a large scale, the important thing in this strain is that the animals' activities are disrupting or threatening to disrupt the orderly business of civilized life. They're destroying crops, making incursions into human settlements, maybe even overrunning cities. But the key characteristic of the Animal Disaster strain is that there's no truly aberrant behavior on the animals' parts, except insofar as they might be responding to novel environmental pressures. They're just doing their thing like they always have, but emergent circumstances have made "their thing" newly inconvenient for their human neighbors. Notable examples: The Swarm, The Pack, It Happened at Lakewood Manor, Fer-de-Lance.
2. Mother Nature's Revenge
These are the movies in which animals start doing formerly uncharacteristic things, seemingly going to war against human dominion over nature. Mother Nature's Revenge films often have an overt environmentalist message, but that isn't an invariable characteristic. Also common but not universal is the idea that the altered animals are responding to, or were created by, some specific act of human interference with the natural order. Occasionally that could even mean a particular animal's private vendetta, either against humans in general, or against a single individual who once did it harm. As a consequence of the latter feature, this strain of animal attack film tends to converge on monster movies more generally, with the animals often being mutants, a newly emergent species, or the product of genetic engineering. I would identify The Birds as the type specimen for this strain, with other notable examples including Frogs, Prophecy, Day of the Animals, and Phase IV.
3. Fly, My Pretties!
These are the films in which the killer animals are doing the bidding of a human, with whom they share some kind of preternatural bond. They tend to have villainous or at least antiheroic protagonists, and are distinguished from Jungle Lord movies by their settings, which are typically urban and invariably civilized. Type specimen: Willard. Other notable examples: Stanley, The Killer Snakes, Mako: The Jaws of Death.
4. Jaws Knockoffs
What distinguishes the Jaws knockoff from other sorts of animal attack film is its compulsive reuse of specific character types and story beats from Jaws itself. There will generally be a benevolent, conscientious authority figure who is beholden to a venal and perhaps downright corrupt one; an expert of some kind, who has difficulty gaining the attention of the authorities; and a gruff, macho huntsman figure who sets out to destroy the troublesome creature, either alone or in partnership with the expert and the benevolent authority. Sometimes two or even all three of those character types are merged into a single person. And almost without exception, there will be some business venture or moneymaking opportunity that would be disrupted if the presence of a killer animal or animals were acknowledged.
One thing that stands out to me when I think about the subject this way is that in the context of 1975, Jaws would have looked like an Animal Disaster film, rather than the beginning of something truly new. It was only that movie's freakish, overwhelming success that caused it to become a plot template for other, lesser pictures. It's also worth noting that because Jaws-knockoff status is a matter of plot and character, it's possible to be one without also being an animal attack film at all. Most notoriously, The Car is unmistakably a Jaws knockoff, but its "shark" is the Devil's hotrod.
Someone on another message board raised the question of supernatural animal attack movies, which I hadn't really considered. Of the two that I've seen, Dracula's Dog slots into category 3 without too much discomfort, since the vampire dogs are all being coordinated, if not exactly commanded, by the Renfield figure who's looking to create a new undead master for himself. I don't know what to do with Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, though. That movie's demonic pooch seems to be mostly a free agent (although human intervention was necessary to arrange its birth), and there's certainly no room for the film in categories 1, 2, or 4.
1. Animal Disasters
This is probably the ancestral lineage, with 1954's The Naked Jungle serving as the type specimen. In these movies, the attacking animals are treated more or less as a natural disaster on par with an earthquake, a tidal wave, or a forest fire. Although there's certainly the potential for individual human deaths, perhaps even on a large scale, the important thing in this strain is that the animals' activities are disrupting or threatening to disrupt the orderly business of civilized life. They're destroying crops, making incursions into human settlements, maybe even overrunning cities. But the key characteristic of the Animal Disaster strain is that there's no truly aberrant behavior on the animals' parts, except insofar as they might be responding to novel environmental pressures. They're just doing their thing like they always have, but emergent circumstances have made "their thing" newly inconvenient for their human neighbors. Notable examples: The Swarm, The Pack, It Happened at Lakewood Manor, Fer-de-Lance.
2. Mother Nature's Revenge
These are the movies in which animals start doing formerly uncharacteristic things, seemingly going to war against human dominion over nature. Mother Nature's Revenge films often have an overt environmentalist message, but that isn't an invariable characteristic. Also common but not universal is the idea that the altered animals are responding to, or were created by, some specific act of human interference with the natural order. Occasionally that could even mean a particular animal's private vendetta, either against humans in general, or against a single individual who once did it harm. As a consequence of the latter feature, this strain of animal attack film tends to converge on monster movies more generally, with the animals often being mutants, a newly emergent species, or the product of genetic engineering. I would identify The Birds as the type specimen for this strain, with other notable examples including Frogs, Prophecy, Day of the Animals, and Phase IV.
3. Fly, My Pretties!
These are the films in which the killer animals are doing the bidding of a human, with whom they share some kind of preternatural bond. They tend to have villainous or at least antiheroic protagonists, and are distinguished from Jungle Lord movies by their settings, which are typically urban and invariably civilized. Type specimen: Willard. Other notable examples: Stanley, The Killer Snakes, Mako: The Jaws of Death.
4. Jaws Knockoffs
What distinguishes the Jaws knockoff from other sorts of animal attack film is its compulsive reuse of specific character types and story beats from Jaws itself. There will generally be a benevolent, conscientious authority figure who is beholden to a venal and perhaps downright corrupt one; an expert of some kind, who has difficulty gaining the attention of the authorities; and a gruff, macho huntsman figure who sets out to destroy the troublesome creature, either alone or in partnership with the expert and the benevolent authority. Sometimes two or even all three of those character types are merged into a single person. And almost without exception, there will be some business venture or moneymaking opportunity that would be disrupted if the presence of a killer animal or animals were acknowledged.
One thing that stands out to me when I think about the subject this way is that in the context of 1975, Jaws would have looked like an Animal Disaster film, rather than the beginning of something truly new. It was only that movie's freakish, overwhelming success that caused it to become a plot template for other, lesser pictures. It's also worth noting that because Jaws-knockoff status is a matter of plot and character, it's possible to be one without also being an animal attack film at all. Most notoriously, The Car is unmistakably a Jaws knockoff, but its "shark" is the Devil's hotrod.
Someone on another message board raised the question of supernatural animal attack movies, which I hadn't really considered. Of the two that I've seen, Dracula's Dog slots into category 3 without too much discomfort, since the vampire dogs are all being coordinated, if not exactly commanded, by the Renfield figure who's looking to create a new undead master for himself. I don't know what to do with Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, though. That movie's demonic pooch seems to be mostly a free agent (although human intervention was necessary to arrange its birth), and there's certainly no room for the film in categories 1, 2, or 4.
